


ravel (of spindles, spells and sisyphus//of centuries and kings)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Background Character Death, Background Nara Shikamaru/Temari - Freeform, F/M, Fantasy AU, Magical Bonds and Other Nonsense, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:29:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22773382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: at eleven years old, sakura was given the chance to outrun her fate and she took it. she's never learned how to stop running.or, sakura knows the weft of magic but she has never learned how to distinguish blessings from curses. a simple tug, and they both unravel. it's a wonder she isn't just a pile of yarn herself; she won't make one of herself or gaara. not if she has the choice.
Relationships: Gaara/Haruno Sakura
Comments: 26
Kudos: 92





	ravel (of spindles, spells and sisyphus//of centuries and kings)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clementive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementive/gifts).



> I blame all of this nonsense on formative influences and _The Witcher_.

** prologue. **

Tsunade is furious when Sakura walks into her chambers, but it’s not her usual fury: all fireworks and dazzle with little real heat, meant more as display than violence. Rather, she’s furious the way Sakura has always imagined glaciers must be furious—frozen and reshaping the continent under the slow inevitability of it all.

Instinctively, the tears start to well in Sakura’s eyes and she blinks them away, mouth threatening to tremble.

She’s spent two decades studying under Tsunade’s guidance, and Sakura knows this fury isn’t for her. Or, rather, it is definitely about Sakura, but it is fury that would if it could reshape the world for Sakura in place of what the world has given her.

Rage is grief is love beating against Sakura’s ribs.

Never, eleven years old surrounded by her herd and the slow, sad future that was undoubtably facing her—of marriage to one of the village boys who had spent years mocking her and then surely twelve children like her mother before her and her mother’s mother before that—could Sakura have imagined that she would be worthy of that fury.

“Your journeyman assignment has come through,” Tsunade finally says.

And, oh, Sakura is not naive enough to have hoped this fury wasn’t for that, but— But. Well.

Two decades later and a mage in her own right and, still, she cannot ever truly escape having been that eleven year old girl.

“How bad?” Sakura asks, clear eyed, dead eyed.

Tsunade thins her lips against a snarl. “You’ll be busy, and you’ll be necessary, and you will see no glory for it. They’ll use you for everything you can give them, and they will use you until there is nothing left. And if you ever dare falter, if you ever have nothing left for them, they will take it to be proof that they were right to have never given you the recognition.”

No, there will never be any escape from that girl. It would kill her, that inevitability, if Sakura were to let it.

Sakura breathes in, settling her weight more balanced over her toes, her fists unclenching. When she breathes out, she imagines breathing out frost.

“To not faltering, then,” Sakura swears.

Tsunade is the kind of woman who has raised and ruined mountains. Sakura has never dared asked her if she has ever for a moment managed to outrun the girl she was once, kingdoms and centuries ago. Sakura has never dared in case the answer was no.

“No,” Tsunade swears in turn, “to a day when the whole world sees you as you really are.”

Sakura could cry at that. Rage and grief and love.

Oh, Tsunade.

This is not a christening, Sakura tries to convince herself.

This is not a curse.

But they are mages, the both of them, with magic singing in their veins.

Kingdoms and centuries. Glaciers and mountains.

There will never be any escaping her.

** i. card. **

Sakura hisses and quickly brings her hand up to her mouth, like she could pull the burn from her knuckle with nothing but the quick application of suction.

That helps the pain, sure, but it’s really the quick spell on the tip of her tongue that prevents the skin from blistering. The concentration it takes to apply the finicky spell has the added bonus of distracting her from the scolding she’s getting, for almost knocking the candelabra all over the head table.

Sakura is a long way from the girl who would have bowed her head and taken the anger as her due, but she is here with a purpose and can’t exactly complete her job if she’s too busy very obviously not being the timid new maid the Head Housekeeper thought she’d hired.

And, really, Sakura wouldn’t be going around almost lighting the Green Room on fire if this blasted curse she’s spent the last three weeks working on removing would simply cooperate and unhook it’s nasty little claws.

“Fine,” Chiyo sighs, “useless girl, go dust the Library. At least that way you will be out of my hair and as far away from the dinner tonight as I can put you! Kindly avoid burning it down, would you? Dust in the dark if that is what it takes. Get!”

Not one to put her pride before an opportunity, Sakura gets.

She’s worked in the palace for long enough to know that there are good odds being in the Library will put her closer to the curse. Sure, she’s certainly not to get much dusting down, but if Chiyo knew the service Sakura was doing her, she’s sure the latter will be ultimately more helpful to the running of a productive, happy palace. Of course, the whole point of smuggling herself into the castle as a maid is that Chiyo will never know of Sakura’s involvement, but, well.

Sakura moves purposefully through the halls, dodging around the various maids and footmen and pages and all the rest of the servants necessary to preparing and hosting a three day long celebration. Apparently she looks busy enough that no one tries to stop her to hold this or run that. Either that, or word of her general incompetence has spread far and wide and no one dares ask her to be useful. Whatever the reason, it takes her less time than she had expected to criss-cross through the palace and slip through the heavy doors into the stillness of the Library.

And, really, “dusting the Library” is cruel make work for a single worker, with its four stories and meandering shelves that hide unexpected seating areas and reading nooks and fireplaces. The space sends a shiver up her spine, and her fingers ache with wanting. Maybe, one day, she’ll be able to return to this place as herself and while away the weeks reading and researching. The people of Kaze no Kuni may be the proud owners of a strong oral tradition, but Suna’s rulers have long curated one of the most well known libraries on the continent. It’s a shame that no member of the Mage Guild has been invited in two generations.

Regretfully, Sakura trails her fingertips along spines as she winds her way through the stacks, feeling her way along the edges of the curse to the best spot in the room for her work.

Finally content with her back to a shelf apparently dedicated to animals of the grasslands that engulf the border of Wind and Fire, Sakura settles her weight over her spine, lets her hands rest gently on her knees, and sinks deeply into her breathing and opens her mind to the Weave.

*

When she was eleven years old, she accidentally destroyed some of her village’s best grazing land when she willed, caught up in her daydreaming with the spindle dropping reflexively in her hands, a sea of flowers into being.

The guild mages who took her away paid the village for its troubles and her parents for the loss of their goats.

Sakura had cried for what she had done in her ignorance, and the red blooms that had strangled all other life in the meadow would never be found anywhere else ever again but that didn’t mean Sakura could stomach roses even now, decades later.

Few mages will share what Magic feels like to them, as if the information were a weapon that could be turned against them. The Academy teachers had taught them to quiet and to listen and to reach, because whatever Magic was to a mage it was always there.

Eleven years old and carded wool turning to yarn under the spinning of her fingers, and Magic has never not been that to her.

Sakura has never embroidered a day in her life and she’s never quite picked up a knack for knitting, but Magic has always been the Weave to her.

She doesn’t understand how the boy-prince has managed to survive so long with this curse knotted so tightly around his neck. Even when she was still a five day’s ride out from Sunagakure she could feel the warp of it, pulling threads out of place.

And now, three weeks into picking away at its seams, Sakura can finally tell how it got so tightly wound.

When she surfaces from her work, the Library is lit by the fires burning in her open palms.

Sakura snaps her fingers closed, extinguishing the flames and leaving the room in complete darkness, but the heat of her rage burns through her.

If the king were not already a shambling half-dead thing, slated for death at the end of Sasuke’s blade, then she would kill him herself.

And then, the palace shakes, and the little thread that has been tugging, tugging, tugging at her through the long hours of painful, rageful work resolves into the realization that, despite their timeline and their planning and Sakura’s explicit messages that she needed at least another two weeks, Naruto and Sasuke are here to finish things.

Sakura stands and runs, without a care for her numb legs or the screaming up ahead or the terrible knowledge that everything is about to go horribly, terribly wrong, and there is nothing she can do to stop it, that all she can do is run and hope she is not too late.

(Of course, she is already thirteen years too late, and there is nothing she can do for the fact that Suna’s king took the curse meant for himself and stabbed it through his pregnant wife, right into the heart of his unborn child. And, under the tie of that black magic wrapped around his throat and the demon feasting on his soul, a boy has been screaming, with no one with the ears to hear him.

Chiyo should not have been wondering at her luck at hiring such a useless maid, but rather her luck at having anything left of a palace or city or country at all.)

*

Later, in the tales they will tell and the songs they will sing of this day, they will remember the rushing sand and the demon’s howls and the mirror bright reflections off the twin swords.

They will not remember Sakura.

But while Naruto and Sasuke fight against the sand and the fury threatening to devour them all, Sakura plunges headfirst into the Weave, screaming against the burn of it, of sand and fury, and finds the soul caught there, holds him tight.

In that space beyond thought and time, all she knows is recognition.

_Oh_ , he would say if this was a place for words, the man who this boy-prince may yet live to become, _of course it was you._

Mountains and glaciers. Centuries and kingdoms.

The whole point of her, is that no one will ever remember Sakura. But there are all kinds of curses in this world, all kinds of blessings.

Sakura holds the weft to stillness and refuses to let him slip.

Sunlight and Naruto plunge into the howling demon’s heart, and a knot finally looses.

_Live well, Gaara no Suna_ , she would tell him if this was a place for words. _Live long. Do not let this be the end of you_.

She wonders what he will make of it, and then she forgets him, because she was never supposed to have been here at all, and she cannot bear to think of all the long centuries facing her, of silence and shadows and forgetting.

This day will never remember her.

It was never supposed to.

** ii. distaff. **

“Stop that,” Ino orders.

Sakura refuses to look up from her knitting. She’s fairly certain she was making decent progress at a scarf at some point, but whatever shape she might have been managing has long ago lost all coherency.“Stop what, my lady? I would hate to be inconveniencing you, my lady.”

Ino snorts, because under the gilding of rank and title and gender she is secretly caustic and imperious and better suited to running a kingdom or a criminal underworld than the empty-headed prettiness usually permitted to a woman of her standing, and tries to jab Sakura in the side with a dagger she has most likely stolen from one of the caravan’s guards.

Sakura simply knees her mare and they prance delicately out of the way, causing the knitted monstrosity currently coming into being on her needles to sway dangerously.

“Stop—” Ino wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know, fretting, or whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s going to give me wrinkles.”

Sakura has known Ino since she was one of the nine “fairy godmothers” attending the girl’s naming ceremony. Unfortunately, this means that Ino has known Sakura that entire time, too, and has never for a minute believed a single lie Sakura has ever tried to sell her.

“I’m not fretting.”

“Hmm.” Ino stares intently at the side of Sakura’s face. “You don’t have to come, you know. I don’t know what it is about Kaze no Kuni that’s tying you up in knots, but you’re useless to me if you can’t pull yourself together.”

Sakura’s chin whips up at that, a snarl forming on her face, and only swallows down the instinctive hex on her lips at the sight of Ino’s knowing and concerned gaze.

“This isn’t like you, Sakura. You’re worrying me. What aren’t you telling me?”

And the answer to that is too complicated for words.

Sakura loves Ino, and has been happy to know her and watch her grow and to call her friend. But Sakura has lived decades before Ino and will live decades after Ino, and there is nothing she can say that can explain the magic that burns in her veins and what it is to thread her way through the Weave.

One day, too soon, and Sakura will forget Ino, either for desperation or for time, the same way she has forgotten so many others.

(And, of course, this is too much a lie. And, of course, this is too much the truth.)

“I don’t have many fond memories of Suna,” is all Sakura can manage.

“Ah,” Ino nods sagely, mouth turning up with wry knowing, “it’s all the sand, isn’t it? Too dry for us flower girls.”

Sakura tries to swallow. “Yeah,” she finally chokes out. “The sand.”

Ino is many things, including smart enough to know when not to continue pushing.

“Well, Master Mage, I’m sure Shikamaru appreciates you’re braving the desert to help him marry his lady love.”

“I’m such a renowned matchmaker, how could I possibly turn down the request for my services?”

They laugh, the unspoken left between them reverberating with it, and Sakura knows in her bones that she has not escaped this.

There is no escaping this.

*

The first sign that all is not well in Suna is the very obvious hole that has been blasted through the city’s main gates and the reek of magic that coats Sakura’s tongue.

She’s nudging her mare into a gallop to reach the front of the caravan before she’s fully processed the scene. Whatever the plans Ino and Shikamaru had made for her presence are now moot in the face of whatever has happened.

The wind whips the hood of her cloak back from her face and tears her hair from its pins, but Sakura simply ties it off with a strip of leather from around her wrist as she lays down shielding along the length of the column, charging for where Ino and Shikamaru and Chōji’s have stopped up ahead.

She reaches them just as an official delegation comes striding through the shattered gates.

The last Sakura saw of her, Temari no Suna was fourteen years old and standing firm despite her red rimmed eyes and her dead father and the sand spilling out of her palace. She’s grown into that steadiness and that grief, and it sits again, now, around her shoulders like a familiar friend.

“Temari—” Shikamaru starts, as if to jump off his mount, but Ino grabs him by the elbow and holds him still.

“Princess Temari,” Chōji continues instead, “how can we be of assistance? Our guard is fifty soldiers strong and we are also accompanied by a mage.”

The princess fists her hands in her skirts and does not waver when she looks up at Sakura, despite the fact that she must surely feel the magic burning off of Sakura as she works.

“Master Mage,” Temari on Suna says, “my brother is dying and the other is stolen. I know the Guild owes us nothing, but I beg your aid.”

Temari, Sakura remembers, had screamed as she had pulled her little brother from the sand that would have smothered him, no one else in the room willing or able to reach him. And, before that, she had stood in the face of the demon that had ridden her little brother’s soul for the last twelve years and screamed as it had plunged a misty taloned hand into her chest and twisted.

“The Guild doesn’t own me, Your Highness, and you will owe neither me nor them anything. It is simply my duty to put to right what dark magic has touched. Your brother, quickly—” Sakura can feel the curse digging its way under his skin from here “—and then we will see about tracking that trail. It won’t be hard to follow; this kind of darkness lingers.”

Temari wastes no time.

For one faced with so much of it, so rarely does Sakura have enough when she needs it.

*

It’s a pretty little curse that Sasori has wrapped around Prince Kankouro.

Sakura unties it and tucks it into her pocket for later use.

*

And, of course, it is rushing and sand to get to Gaara in time.

There are no twin swords this time, though. Only the sword that Sasori plunges through Sakura’s stomach.

And, of course, it all comes back to that curse in the end.

She’d told Naruto and Sasuke she hadn’t had enough time.

She’d told the Guild they needed to make sure it had all be done properly.

This is her failure, left unaddressed.

Because where she’d torn the curse from him, magic has grown deep roots in the scars left all over the boy-prince, boy-prince no longer. Untrained and prime picking for any mage unprincipled enough to cut the magic out of him for themselves.

He curls up around her when Sakura has the breath to poke at him in the Weave, checking to see if he’s still alive.

She leaves bloody fingerprints across his cheek and neck as she checks his pulse.

Before she falls into unconsciousness, their green gazes catch for a single, brilliant moment.

_Oh_ , she does not hear, _of course. It is always you._

** iii. skein. **

Sakura has spent most of the wedding celebrations doing her best not to get backed into any corners by any of the other attendees.

It’s the first celebrations of the kind that she’s attended while not a member of the Guild, which means in theory that she gets to wear whatever she wants, but in reality means she’s in some concoction that Ino has tricked her into.

Her pride is one of the few things she has left to her, so Sakura doesn’t think about how lovely the sumptuous red is or how the cut of the gown makes her feel beautiful or how she appreciates the clever design that will allow her to move unhindered at the slightest need.

Across the large hall, the Guild representatives are doing their best to simultaneously pretend she is beneath their notice while casting out as many malicious little hexes as they can manage. Sakura daintily sidesteps the latest, spinning it back in their direction with a bite, and turns right into a solid chest.

And, really, this is what she gets for trying to drown out the quiet intensity of his thread; she loses track of him in the crowd.

“Master Sakura,” Prince Gaara says, “I was hoping to ask you to dance.”

Three years to wrangle the politics of it all and then plan an appropriately grand wedding for the Crown Princess of Kaze no Kuni and the Nara Heir, and Sakura has managed to avoid being in the same room as him. Helped, of course, by the intense magical training she insisted was necessary if Temari wanted her little brother to not be kidnapped by every unscrupulous mage until the end of time or his eventual death.

Sakura bows her head and grits her teeth. “Of course, Your Highness, it would be my pleasure.”

She takes the elbow he offers and he sweeps them onto the dance floor.

Sakura’s skin crackles where they touch, their magic sparking, and she is thankful that Ino’s sartorial choices for her included gloves.

Here’s the thing, of course: twice, Sakura has saved this man’s life, plunging deep into the Weave to hold him to it, like braided threads. There is no undoing that. They are not bound now, but they have been, and so they will have been forever more.

Here’s the thing, of course: he’s had three years of training, and he’ll never be a Guild Mage, but Gaara knows the taste of her magic under his tongue even if he doesn’t remember it, and he is looking at her like she is familiar, like she holds the answers of the universe, like he is something he did not know that he was looking for. It’s all artificial, of course, but he doesn’t know that. Not when the magic burning in his veins is screaming differently.

And, of course, here’s the thing: it’s not just Gaara who is drawn as a moth to flame.

But Sakura knows better.

And, yet, the music pulls them close, requisite inches between their bodies vibrating. The magic wants to pull them closer, back to braided, because the Weave remembers and repeats.

Gaara is bright red hair and sea green eyes and Sakura does not think about all the ways they are inverted to each other.

She’s never been the twin to anyone’s sword. She’s never been the sun to anyone’s moon. And she never will be.

And she certainly will not be an unscrupulous mage, shearing the magic from Gaara’s bones until there is nothing left of him.

For a moment, Sakura lets herself pretend that she is the woman the eleven year old girl she once was imagined one day she might become: twenty-five years old, dressed in a ballgown gifted to her by a fairy godmother or a pair of brownies or a kind mistress, stealing a dance with a prince who will have come to love her by midnight. But the moment collapses around her, and she is simply Sakura as she has ever been—mountains and glaciers—and this story has never been hers.

The music ends and Gaara holds her tight for a breath too long before releasing her.

They stare at each other, chests heaving like they’ve run a race, as the couples around them break apart.

Finally, Gaara blinks and looks down.

He uncurls his hands so that he can take Sakura’s and press a kiss to the back of it. “Until next we meet, then, Master Mage.”

Sakura resists the urge to turn her hand over in his grip and take him by the chin, pull him up to press against her chest to chest.

This is magic, nothing more.

It will fade. 

“Until next we meet, Your Highness,” Sakura answers, and swears to herself that they never will.

** iv. loom. **

“How long will you wander?” Tsunade had asked her, the last time they met, the inn’s table sticky under their elbows and too many glasses around them.

“As long as it takes,” Sakura had answered.

She still doesn’t know what she is waiting to happen.

*

Kingdoms and centuries.

As Sakura learns, they rise and fall so quickly.

*

She had never expected him here, and she doesn’t know if that was common sense or grief talking, but she hadn’t been looking for him and yet here he is.

He hasn’t grown any since she last saw him, and his hair is still as red and his eyes still as green.

There are no wrinkles on his face, just as there are no wrinkles on her own, and she hates him for it. Hates him for being young and alive when Ino is dead and buried.

“I am so sorry,” he says, like he has not outlived both his siblings and some of their children, and will not go on to outlive the rest, “for your loss. I know that you loved her.”

Decades and her grief and the sumptuous material of her gown between them, and still her skin sparks under his touch as he presses a hand to the small of her back, keeping her upright.

“Shut up,” Sakura spits, “don’t talk like you know me.”

Gaara smiles at her then, pained and grief-stricken. “Oh, Sakura, you know just as well as me that that isn’t true.”

He holds her as she sobs, her open-mouthed wails muffled against his shoulder.

Their hips slot together perfectly, and Sakura surrenders to her grief instead of thinking about all the ways her magic fits perfectly into his own.

*

She’s made it half-way across the country before he’s even woken.

** interlude. **

The Weave is many things, magic most of all, and it loves its patterns, its repetition, its stability.

And, oh, it loves its braided souls most of all.

_I have you,_ Sakura had once promised in a space beyond thought or time, _if you trust me, I will not let you go. They will not take you from me._ And then at his acquiescence she had braided them tighter and refused to let a demon have him.

(Here is a blessing. Here is a curse.)

*

Sakura knows she is dreaming, the way she always knows she dreaming when she is here, purple sky and purple grass and the moon and the sun dancing across the sky together.

_I have missed you_ , the man she chooses to forget whispers across the soft skin of her stomach. _You are missing from me_.

She turns her face away when he would kiss her and then catches his tears on her fingers in recompense.

She doesn’t know why they keep doing this.

She doesn’t know how to escape doing this.

*

“To a day when the world sees you as you truly are,” Tsunade had toasted.

Yes, Sakura was afraid of that.

** v. tapestry. **

It’s somewhere between saving a herd of unicorn and hearing that Sasuke’s betrayal has finally caught up with him and fighting a plague and losing a war the wanted no part in and around every corner she finds herself missing his grave face and the way she feels when the space between their bodies vibrates that Sakura realizes there is no escaping it.

If Ino were still alive, she would throw her head back on a cackle and tell Sakura to just fuck him already and get it over and done with, so that could finally move on.

Instead, it is Kakashi—her ex-teacher and once prison guard, the man who ruins every thing he touches and will be loyal to the cause that devours him until the bitter end—who says to her, “I thought you were never willing to be defined by what Fate laid out for you? I never took you for a coward, Sakura.”

They’re fighting the same losing war, and Sakura punches him in the face.

“Yeah,” Kakashi says after he’s spat blood and tooth out, “you’re right, I probably deserved that.”

There are debts she’s owed and debts she owes, and Sakura decides that she’s more than paid off the ones that have stuck her here.

*

There are songs where they sing her name, now, and tales that tell of her deeds.

These are not the misconceptions she is seeking to clear up.

*

Sakura has lived centuries and will live centuries more when she finally finds him.

“Homesick?” she asks Gaara as she sits down next to him.

The water is cool at their feet and the trees are strong at their backs and outside this oasis the winds are howling, whipping up the sand dunes.

Gaara finally turns his head to look at her. “And what are you missing?” he asks of her in turn.

Glaciers and mountains.

Enough time and love, and even Sakura is made into something new.

Kingdoms and centuries between them, and still the space between them vibrates for wanting.

Gaara stills further yet when Sakura puts her hand to his cheek, magic sparking between them.

“You,” Sakura murmurs into the soft hollow of his mouth. “I have been missing from you.”

*

Sakura has always pretended that her dreams evaporate away with the day like so much dew, but she betrays herself as she arcs into Gaara’s familiar touch, chasing the path she knows his fingers will follow.

_It’s you_ , she tells him as he slides into her, flesh to flesh and soul to soul. _It’s always been you._

Gaara kisses her like a dead man to waking. _I have you. If you would have me, I will not let you go._

Magic is burning in their veins and except with him, Sakura will never know death.

_I love you_.

And this is what it is, as the Weave sings them together, to be known.

*

Beyond them, the sandstorm howls.

Centuries and kingdoms. Mountains and glaciers. Curses and blessings.

In the end, never does she falter.

That’s all there is.


End file.
